London Stage in the 20th Century
By Robert Tanitch
Haus Publishing £30

The rave reviews and rubbishings, the divas and the nose-dives: Robert Tanitch’s Book is a Herculean trawl through every major production staged in London in the 20th century. I approached this encyclopaedia with trepidation, but discovered a greatly readable book within. In its function as an objective almanac, it is interesting in a variety of ways.

Here, the plots of many of the iconic productions that have provided the furniture of my London life are finally unravelled. These plot descriptions are full, and often contain sharp comment themselves when a quoted review is not available. It’s also a look at a vanished century from a dramatic perspective, and here it proves extremely interesting. We see an Othello performance in 1930 receive unsettled reviews after the use of a black actor: one critic left the theatre because he was seated near some black members of the audience. Titbits like these make this directory a teeming trove of theatre lore, from the prolific period of the turn of the century to the Starlight Express glam of the 1980s.

We see Noël Coward take cover from the Blitz to write Blithe Spirit, and Anthony Hopkins’s various turkeys. We also see how the medium of theatre took on the contemporary, expressive role now more reserved for films. Plays like The Death of a Salesman, that so captured the depressed mood of a post-war Britain, are brought to light here with vivid anecdotes about the play’s reception.

Highlights of the photography include a doe-eyed Judi Dench as a youthful Juliet, and a (believe it or not) chubby Maggie Smith onstage in 1964. The excerpts from the reviews are all well chosen, and although they do thin out in stages, some are spectacular: from “everything falls so flat it should have opened on Shrove Tuesday” to “the work is unmitigated tosh. But it is tosh of the highest quality.”

One interesting pattern that emerges from the reviews is the critics’ quickness to label productions ‘the best ever’. Through the predictable reappearance of this accolade, decade after decade, the reviews show us how tempting it is to believe that our current time is the most sophisticated, the most advanced. The volume contains separate indexes for name, titles and theatres, and also a yearly section featuring world premieres and deaths. There is also a detailed map of London’s Theatreland.

The volume is both a reference book, a collection of stories and, in some ways, an obituary of a falling star. For this history tells a sad story – that the proliferation of entertainment media has forced the theatre to leave society’s mainstream and become more of a tourist attraction.

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